A tractor/baler combination is used in agriculture to take up crop lying or standing on a field and to press and bind it to a bale. An operator sits at an operator station of the tractor and steers the tractor along the crop. Usually, a baler monitor or a reconfigurable display connected to a bus system is located within the field of view of the operator. The operator has to look at the monitor or display at regular intervals, since it displays information on the actual state of the baler.
In the prior art, the operator also has to obey a number of actions displayed to him or her on the display or monitor, although a number of baler functions have been automated recently, like opening and closing rear doors of the baler to allow a bale to eject. One of these actions is to stop the driving motion of the tractor once a bale is ready to be bound with twine or wrapped with net or sheet material, in order to stop additional crop from entering the baling chamber that would disturb the binding or wrapping action.
Automatic systems have been proposed for controlling the propelling speed of the tractor in a manner such that a desired crop throughput is obtained. They still rely on the operator to stop the tractor once a bale is to be bound or wrapped.
Another duty of the operator is to steer the tractor along the swath. Automatic steering systems recognizing the swath using a video camera and an image processing system or a scanning laser sensor detecting the contour of the swath have been proposed, but they attempt to drive along the center of the swath. This leads to a barrel shaped bale with less crop material at the edges than at its center due to the shape of the swath. Sensors for the shape of the bale have been proposed that give steering information to the operator, but they still rely on a manual steering operation.
The described duties are fatiguing for an operator who has driven and controlled the tractor/baler combination for a longer time. It is thus an object of the present invention to provide a tractor/baler combination with additional automatic functions that make work for the operator less fatiguing.